natbro

smells more like an auto-respond or ai-respond to extant issues. we will farm out reproducing this bug to the OG, both to save us time and because if they don't complain it must be a signal this isn't important anymore.

Tools, and instructions for more easily installing and launching Windows games via Wine or CrossOver directly in the macOS Steam client. Rough edges abound.

ever heard of ActiveX? you know, arbitrary code installing and running in your browser and available to be scripted by javascript? sorry. I'm not solely responsible, there were many of us. but still sorry, pretty responsible. we were young. code-signing as a means of validating origin was a great idea. it needed additional infrastructure to keep track of originators and to prevent abuse, though, and that wasn't perfectly thought through or executed. live and learn.

ever heard of ActiveX? you know, arbitrary code installing and running in your browser on Windows and available to be scripted by javascript? like, instead of Java? sorry. I'm not solely responsible, but sorry, pretty responsible. we were young. code-signing as a means of validating origin was a great idea. though it needed additional infrastructure to prevent abuse and allow global revocation, and that wasn't perfectly thought through or executed. live and learn. :grinning-emoji:

yes, it would have to be a new Apple-TV with at least some more local storage. the current models have 8GB, I think. tweaking that up to 128GB or 256GB would open up a lot of possibilities without making a $199 price-point impossible. but hey, what do i know.

i'm honestly not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. if you are: heh, good one. if you're not: there's nothing wrong with putting some of your wood behind encouraging casual gaming and expanding your market, but putting ALL of your wood behind it? what else did they get accomplished in this time period? not enough other things if you take a look at how many people and how much money was being spent on R&D in that division.

Well put, and although I may be somewhat biased, I agree -- financial muscle only gave us the ability to get on the field, it doesn't help you win or have a long-term strategy. The original hardware profile (PC-like so tools were available) and including a HDD was what allowed us to get game developers on-board quickly. Including the HDD and the NIC were also the bets, and as I tried to say in my original post, these were the innovations and the bets on the living-room Trojan horse -- we could afford to include these things because the console business model involved an audience size, a higher bill-of-material and a payback model which things like set-top-boxes and WebTV did not. Securing a few awesome first- and second-/third-party games exclusively to the console was also a critical tactic early on. I remain somewhat surprised that outside Halo there are no longer standout exclusive titles. I don't know why that effort has been dropped, that's stupid, too.

Thank you for the thoughtful and spot-on response. I completely agree. My draft was nowhere near as well-put, I have discarded it post-haste.

I honestly don't know if Apple will enter this market, but I'm not quite as pessimistic as you are about the profit margin as the reason not to.

I think they could build a next-generation-console-capable Apple-TV and sell it at or below $199 while keeping their 40% margin. They would sell you each additional wireless controller (and it would be sweetly designed, I suspect) for the standard $79 peripheral cost.

The primary contributor to their bill-of-material cost savings vs. competitors is that they already own and/or license at huge volume their CPU and GPU cores and know how to fabricate them in multi-core formats with high-speed cross-connectivity. They can also buy RAM and flash for SSD storage at better costs than anybody else. These are the primary cost drivers (basically money flowing to IBM, nVidia, etc for CPU/GPU and money flowing elsewhere for RAM/SSD/HDD) for xBox, PS, Wii.

Apple would have dramatically lower overall startup costs versus the original xBox/xBox360 and PS2/3 given they already have a toolchain and SMP operating system with sandboxing, an App Store and its back-end, user-accounts and payment infrastructure, and numerous other costs shared with the rest of the Mac and iOS ecosystems.

Apple wouldn't have a lot of work to do to train developers: tell us the screen resolution, how to interact with the controller and any other new hardware capabilities, tell us anything special about the GPU's and let us go to town with the existing toolchain we are using for iPhone and iPad.

So, again, I have no idea if they'll do it, I just think it would be a very profitable business for them.

I'm sorry I didn't mention Valve's steam as a competitor in the post, I am very very excited to see what they come up with. I <3 Valve. I do think Apple and Android have a little more indie developer momentum right now, but not sure how that will play out long-term.

The dawning horror for the console vendors is that the change is already happening around them and on every iPhone, iPad, Samsung, Android, etc device. These already have digital-only distribution. These already have very high-quality GPU's that push almost as many triangles as an xBox 360 or PS3, and are on a faster product-iteration-cycle. Some of these - iPad3 and Samsung Galaxy Tab's - already have higher-resolution screens than your 60" HDTV and many people are using them more hours per day and spending more dollars per device than they ever did on consoles. Yikes, if I were still in the console biz, I would push like hell to move a little faster than updating hardware every 7-8 years and doing poorly with software.